Published by Yale University Press, 2025
Softcover, 403 pages
26.6 x 28 cm | 10.5 × 11 in
Illustrations in color and black and white
Edited by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf and Elisabeth Sussman
ISBN 9780300284508
Made on occasion of the exhibition 'Sixties Surreal' at the Whitney Museum of Art
on view September 24, 2025–January 29, 2026
From the Publisher:
Challenging what we think we know about art of the 1960s, this volume moves beyond the established movements of pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism to shine a light on how American artists created a unique type of surrealism, making works suffused with eroticism, dread, wonder, violence, and liberation. A series of essays reveals how this new surrealism enabled artists to reconnect art to an increasingly untethered reality following the period of rapid postwar transformation and to imagine new worlds and models for art rooted in political and social change. Presenting a new framework to understand the work of artists such as Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Nutt, John Outterbridge, Ralph Arnold, H. C. Westermann, Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Christina Ramberg, and Robert Arneson, this study features an expansive chronology that highlights how a broad group of artists across the United States connected to each other through exhibitions, galleries, and collectives, offering a fresh perspective on how artists in the 1960s harnessed psychoanalysis, wordplay, and assemblage, among other strategies, to create new horizons for subject matter and form that continue to reverberate in American art today.